Modernity

We can look forward for beginnings but also backward or even sideways with the benefit of alternative history fiction. In SM Stirling's Shadows Of Annihilation:

"The Army Air Corps base outside Jerez was a dose of undiluted twentieth-century modernity, like something out of the 1920s or 1930s rather than their own decade, blazing with electric lights through the dimness of a rainy afternoon." (TWELVE, p. 274)

This chapter is dated June 21, 1917 (B).

This post and the preceding one have looked at:

Heinlein's Future History;
Anderson's Psychotechnic History;
Anderson's Technic History;
Stirling's Black Chamber Trilogy.

These three authors' characters variously look forward to or begin to experience:

ubiquitous electric lighting;
solar and nuclear energy, moving roads and rocket travel;
an applied social science;
the springtime of Technic civilization...

And now for a comment from one of the Three Fates:

"Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. MESSY little things. Give me a good ending any time. You know where you ARE with an ending."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones (New York, 1996), Part One, p. 1.

And who should know better than her?

Heinlein, Anderson, Stirling and Gaiman: can it get any better?